The thing about my way of teaching stats is that my cool, novel examples get old really fast. Like, pop culture is on a thirty-day cycle. Anyway, YEARS ago, 2014 to be exact, I blogged about illustrating bimodal data distributions using baby name data from the Social Security Administration. Specifically, when an older name comes back into vogue, it has a bimodal distribution when you plot time on the X axis. I stand by this example. However, all of the data illustrations come from 2014. When our traditionally aged college students were 6 or 7. Which makes this example feel a little stale. However, here is some data, courtesy of Redditor fevaah , showing old names that are back in vogue through 2025 ! And Eleanor, Violet, Nora, and Hazel are here, illustrating bimodal distributions for a new generation. If you used my old baby-name data, this is a quick, easy refresh for your lectures (or a fun new addition if you didn't). If this idea was help...
Here is another example of why representative sampling MUST include women. For years and years, car crash test dummies for adults were all based upon the 50th percentile male. As such, even in vehicles with high safety ratings, women still have higher rates of certain injuries (head, neck, pelvis) than men. In fact, the article cites research that found that belted female car occupants in accidents have a 47% higher chance of suffering a serious injury and a 71% higher chance of suffering a moderate injury compared to men in a car.
I wrote a previous blog post about this video that outlines how using only male rats for pharmaceutical research lead to problems with disproportionately high numbers of side effects in female humans. And this NPR story details changes to federal rules in order to correct this issue with animal testing.
How to use in class:
-Inappropriate sampling is hurting and killing women.
-Many test dummies are constructed using descriptive statistics to create an "average" human. The most often used dummy represents a 50th percentile male.
-Pair it with my articles/stories/videos about the lack of female representation in pharmaceutical testing and you've got yourself a nice class discussion about representative sampling and subtle but dangerous forms of sexism (Why is an average male considered an average human? How can this problem be addressed?).
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| http://leevinsel.com/blog/2013/12/30/why-carmakers-always-insisted-on-male-crash-test-dummies |
I wrote a previous blog post about this video that outlines how using only male rats for pharmaceutical research lead to problems with disproportionately high numbers of side effects in female humans. And this NPR story details changes to federal rules in order to correct this issue with animal testing.
How to use in class:
-Inappropriate sampling is hurting and killing women.
-Many test dummies are constructed using descriptive statistics to create an "average" human. The most often used dummy represents a 50th percentile male.
-Pair it with my articles/stories/videos about the lack of female representation in pharmaceutical testing and you've got yourself a nice class discussion about representative sampling and subtle but dangerous forms of sexism (Why is an average male considered an average human? How can this problem be addressed?).